Put a ceiling on overregulation

President Barack Obama may have inadvertently revealed one area of common ground with the Republicans during his recent news conference laying out sharp differences with the GOP.

“We’re reviewing government regulations, so that we can fix any rules in place that are an unnecessary burden on business,” Obama said, following up on his calls earlier this year for repealing “outdated regulations that stifle job creation.”

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POLITICO 44

This language sounds strikingly similar to language in the House GOP’s “Plan for America’s Job Creators,” released in May. “We must remove,” this plan states, “onerous federal regulations that are redundant, harmful to small businesses and impede private-sector investment and job creation.”

Though both parties now want the debt ceiling package to address issues of economic growth, no one has put measures to rein in regulation on the table. Since Obama and GOP leaders are saying that overregulation is a barrier to job creation, it’s time to make regulatory curbs part of the debt ceiling negotiations.

Regulations cost the U.S. economy roughly $1.75 trillion per year, according to the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy. The 2010 Federal Register, which spells out all new government regulations, stands at an all-time high of 81,405 pages, as counted by the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s annual study, “Ten Thousand Commandments” (which, in full disclosure, was written by one of the authors of this piece).

There is strong precedent for including regulatory reform in a debt ceiling deal. In 1996, President Bill Clinton’s and the Republican-controlled Congress’s sharp differences resulted in a breach of the debt limit for more than four months, as well as a shutdown of government services that took more prominence in the headlines. The GOP Congress ultimately yielded in its demand that Clinton had to sign on to a balanced-budget plan with deep spending cuts.

In return, however, the $5.5 trillion debt ceiling hike that Clinton signed advanced another major GOP concern: overregulation. The Congressional Review Act expedited the process for Congress to block a regulation after a final rule had been issued. It also added judicial review provisions to the Regulatory Flexibility Act to help ensure that regulations weren’t overly burdensome to small business.

Clinton praised the law for “respond[ing] to the legitimate concerns of small businesses regarding regulatory burdens” in his signing statement.

The ideological gulf today between Obama and the GOP on many of these regulations is indeed wide. It may be unrealistic to address specific rules stemming from the health care and financial overhauls in the debt ceiling deal.

Anyone who has been involved in running a business of any decent knows how much burden government puts on business and how expensive they make it. It is what is killing this economy. All thanks to the Democrats.

Obama has gone out of his way to find the smartest Ivy League graduates to be his czars and to run his government departments. If these highly educated graduates of our elite schools feel that we need more regulations, they must be right and we should obey them.

What we need is smart regulation FDR regulated the banking system sucessfully for 40 years. it wasn't until repub came along and started deregulation of those laws that we had a problem. I wonder why??? A Fox in the hen house come to mind.

Remember that it was been the Republicans, particularly since Reagan, that gave us the tsunami of deregulation (lack of oversight) that has ushered in the wave of economic and corporate scandals since that have cost taxpayers billions, now trillions, under their deregulated Wall St. rich greed-fest of unregulated credit default swaps and mortage-based securities that came close to destroying the entire American and global economy.

The GOP (Greed On Parade) folks have shown in the past and through their GOP-approved 435-plus war-profiteers in Iraq and Afghanistan, who failed in their nation-building while posting over $8 billion in waste, fraud, and abuse plus another $6.6 billion in stolen Iraqi funds, that without oversight they will lie, cheat, and steal. Efforts by the Democrats in Congress to hold these corrupt corporations accountable were rebuffed by the GOP in Congress repeatedly.

Judgment Day cannot come soon enough for these slimeballs, but it is coming. No amount of GOP spin or burden ing wealth will save them.

Miss Bush-Cheney? Their corrupt, nightmare regime of neo-con-artists will last generations:

Their administration more than doubled the National Debt adding $6.1 trillion. Five million manufacturing jobs lost and 8.5 million lost during the Bush Great Recession at a rate of 600,000 per month during the last half of 2008 and into the first three months of 2009 or before the ARRA went into effect.. 2002-2007 median wages dropped while more people went into poverty. By 2008, household wealth went down $14 trillion. In 2006, home equity was $13 trillion; mid-2008, it was $8.8 trillion. In 2006, retirement assets were $10.3 trillion; by mid-2008, it was $8 trillion. Savings and investments after 2006 lost $1.2 trillion, while pension assets lost $1.3 trillion. In 2007, state pension funds were 96 percent funded so do not blame unions.

Obama has gone out of his way to find the smartest Ivy League graduates to be his czars and to run his government departments. If these highly educated graduates of our elite schools feel that we need more regulations, they must be right and we should obey them.

Just what we don't need is to make the debt issue MORE complicated. Its way beyond most of the geniuses in Congress already.

We should have some kind of "sunset" provision for regulations that terminates them if they can't be shown to do anything productive. But lets set up a mechanism for that after we cobble something together on the debt limit and the budget deficits.

What type of regulations are we talking about? Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards requiring automobiles and small trucks to have airbags? I'm OK with airbags being optional equipment, and not required by regulatory rules. The whole deal was probably cooked up by American automakers to block the importing of foreign model cars anyway. It didn't work.

“We’re reviewing government regulations, so that we can fix any rules in place that are an unnecessary burden on business,” Obama said, following up on his calls earlier this year for repealing “outdated regulations that stifle job creation.”

This language sounds strikingly similar to language in the House GOP’s “Plan for America’s Job Creators,” released in May. “We must remove,” this plan states, “onerous federal regulations that are redundant, harmful to small businesses and impede private-sector investment and job creation.”

Translation: WAAAAAH we don't want a level playing field financially (so we can plunder consumers) and we don't care about the enviroment (screw the planet and the Caribou)...we wanna make a lot of money and don't care about anything else!

Yes security cost money! Money spent to enforce rules and regulations which promote honesty is not wasted nor should they be seen as a burden. Doing business in this nation is not a right, it is a privilege! Those who choose to avail themselves of this "privilege" are subjecting themselves to a state of servitude to the good of the County and community they dwell in and they are granted many benefits and are honored in many ways for their willingness to do so.

Unfortunately there is a vast minority in the business world who have availed themselves of the privilege and the accompanying benefits and rejected the notion of servitude which is their lot in life. These are but predators who cannot be trusted, cannot be left unobserved, must be regulated and ruled or they will bankrupt our communities, our nation, and the people of the world.

Yes, the rules, regulations and the enforcement of them are costly, costly to us all, not just the business community. But the cost of not regulating and ruling over those who avail themselves of the privilege to run a business in this Country is much, much higher.

there is no over-regulation on industry in this country!! If anything the republicans have sabotaged law enforcement for 30 years. In particular, the Bushies allowed the overseers of Mining to go to bed with the industry magnates. Violations of the law went unreported or scandalously low fines for infractions. That was and still is the republican modus operendi. On a local level, our past republican governor Bob Ehrlich almost gutted the Dept of the Environment when he was in power (one term only). the people of MD got rid of him and his lax attention to law enforcement. And as for de-regulation, Wall Street is the poster child for abuse of power and privilege. The congress gave them self determination and they robbed, stole from and defrauded the american people. And of course, we know what happens when the EPA fails to do its job monitoring and writing regulations for the oil and gas industry. The Gulf of Mexico, big spill, company lied to regulators about ability to curtail the damage. Oh, and of course the lates EXXON MOBIL pipeline breach, with thousands of gallons of oil etc... into the Yellowstone River. Fortunately, for the people of MT, the have a dem in the governor's position, who is also a soil expert, so they will have to fess up and pay out and the people will get justice. BUSINESS needs regulation because behind the corporate shield are a bunch of ambitious, egotistical, driven individuals whose only purpose is to improve the bottom line. And as demonstrated in Murdochs case, it really doesn't matter how big you are, greed is insatiable and any means to profit is acceptable. Regulations and federal agencies evolved because of the abuses of public trust perpetrated by business operations in the US. Lest we forget: the FDA-rodent parts in canned food, salmonella poisoning. CDC worldwide epidemics because of water pollution, soil contamination, poisonings. FCC-to protect the free flow of truthful information over public airwaves. Truth in lending, Truth in Advertising because those industries; cheated, stole from and exploited american consumers. Even GOD recognized that mankind had to have rules, He gave us the TEN COMMANDMENTS. Without rules, there is chaos and in the case of the new INTERNATIONALISM, WE ARE DEALING with a whole bunch of countries with varying human values when it comes to the importance of human life. Just how many lives is the acceptable price for manufacturing of a dress, a pair of shoes etc...Quite the contrary with all the international players entering the US market place we need to add regulation and increase law enforcement.